'Kill switch' dropped from Vista — Microsoft is to withdraw an anti-piracy tool from Windows Vista, which disables the operating system when invoked, following customer complaints. — The so-called "kill switch" is designed to prevent users with illegal copies of Vista from using certain features.

Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia — The Register Desktop Support Seminar . Live & Online 11th December (10am PST) — On the surface, all is well in Wikiland. Just last week, a headline from The San Francisco Chronicle told the world that "Wikipedia's Future Is Still Looking Up," …

Google Announces Fastest Growing Search Terms — Yesterday Yahoo announced its top search trends for 2007. Google's list traditionally come later in December (here's last years list), but today VP of Search and User Experience Marissa Mayer revealed the "fastest rising U.S. search terms" on the Today Show.

The next evolution of labels — Back in the Paleolithic Era, the world was a very different kind of place. People were hunter-gatherers, lived in caves, and kept all their email in folders*. You can't really blame them. Between tracking woolly mammoths, fashioning crude stone tools …

Where the hell is Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook? — It's just totally amazing to me how badly Facebook is handling the PR around its new Beacon system. — This story is NOT going away. Even if this particular story goes away, there's a bad taste in our mouths because Facebook tried to do something that clearly wasn't for the users.

iPhone browsing marketshare closes in on .1% — Net Applications came out with its quarterly browser marketshare report this weekend. More surprising than the solid market share gains that the Mac platform made, was iPhone's phenomenal showing. — .09 percent may seem …

Kenmos and Nano-Op supply LED notebook BLUs to Dell and Apple — Kenmos Technology and Taiwan Nano Electro-Optical Technology (Nano-Op) have become suppliers of notebook-use LED backlight units (BLUs) for Dell and Apple, with the makers' shipments to the segment expected to soar, according to industry sources.

Web Hosting Providers Let Security Sag — Web hosting providers that can't keep DNS servers clean are exposing low-budget government Web sites to malware. — Riddle: What do the city of Plainville, Kan., and the Transportation Authority of Marin County, Calif., have in common?

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